With their out-of-the-box thinking, young programmers addressed village economic planning, learning challenges in school children, data packet sniffing, and wearable disaster response technologies. 

India – August 2022

No problem is too big…. No idea is too small! Three teams from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham designed software solutions that are first-prize winners in this year’s grand finale of the Central Government’s Smart India Hackathon. Two are from the Amritapuri campus School of Computer Science & Engineering and one is from the university’s School of Arts and Sciences, Mysuru.

In addition, a team with Amrita Institutions in Nagercoil, Tamil Nadu bagged first prize in the competition to design hardware systems. The students are with the Amrita College of Engineering & Technology.

Winning teams received ₹1 lakh in their respective categories, a tremendous feat considering more than eight million students from across India took part in this year’s competition.

Jointly organized by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and the Ministry of Education, the initiative promotes innovative, out-of-the-box thinking in young minds to create a platform to solve some of the pressing issues we face as a society. The teams create functioning software or hardware to inculcate a culture of product innovation and a mindset for problem-solving.

Code of Duty 1 from the Amritapuri engineering campus competed under the issue titled ‘Development of Digital Interface for Spatial Economic Plan’. They designed a software interface to address shift-share analysis and input-output theory at a cluster level scale for village panchayats, the basic governing bodies for rural communities.

The team was comprised of S4 B.Tech CSE-AI students Dhruvjyoti Swain, Dhanush Krishna, Akhbar Sha, Megha R, Moturi Karthikeya, and S Madhan. Their grand finale was under the Ministry of Rural Development and held over two days at Kolhapur Institute of Technology (KIT) in Maharashtra.

Team Avengers, also with the Amritapuri engineering campus, competed under the software initiative titled ‘Identifying Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, Dysgraphia, Dyspraxia, Autism or ADHD in School-going Children’. The competition was under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and held at Vaageswari College of Engineering based in Telangana.

The team included S2 B.Tech students Suraksha Rajagopalan (S2 EAC), Lekha Sathvik Devabathini (S2 CS-AI), Gajji Mohit Yadav (S2 CS-AI), Pranav Krishna U (S2 CS-AI), Nambiar Krishnendu Radhakrishnan (S2 CSE), and Rohit Rajesh Nair (S2 ELC).

Network Traffic Analyzer, the team with Amrita’s Mysuru campus, took part in the software competition held at Gandhi Institute of Engineering and Technology (GIET) University in Gunupur, Odisha and was under the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). The team included Vibha, Abhijna, Pranav, Apeksha, Surabhi, and Padmaja with the Department of Computer Science.

They participated in the category for Blockchain & Cybersecurity and developed a system for “packet sniffing”, a network traffic analysis and monitoring process used to keep an eye on all incoming and outgoing traffic, network activity, and availability. By analysing data packets sent across the network, they prototyped a means to detect anomalies, identify operational issues, and compare real-time networks with historical data to identify potential threats and issues.

Meanwhile, the Elite-Squad from the Mata Amritanandamayi Math’s engineering and technology college in Nagercoil developed a hardware system for disaster management via smart wearables for rescue teams. The team’s prototype consists of drones with a thermal sensor to detect the presence of people in stricken areas and then send the information to rescue teams’ smart watches. The system includes an emergency call system for rescuers if they need assistance.

Their competition came under the government’s National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) and the event was held at the AD Patel Institute of Technology in Anand, Gujarat. The Elite-Squad team included II Year B.E-ECE students Aishvarya B, Adarsh AR, Aswin Sindhu SK, Aswin Jino HV, Dharan VS, and Kohila S.

Many other Amrita students also took part in this year’s events, which were organized as part of the Govt of India’s Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav initiative. We are very proud of our entire family for living up to the challenge of finding solutions for the problems the world faces by putting so many emerging talents to work.

The Smart India Hackathon includes categories to address smart education; disaster management; smart automation; fitness & sports; heritage & culture; medtech/biotech/healthtech; agriculture, food tech & rural development; smart vehicles; transportation & logistics; robotics & drones; clean & green technology; tourism; renewable/sustainable energy; blockchain & cybersecurity; and miscellaneous.